Editorial: Politicians off-side on players' names

We cringe any time politicians come near Canada’s game. But the latest instance, courtesy of Canadian Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly and other Quebec politicians, is especially offside, from where we’re sitting.

They’re publicly facing off with Hockey Canada over a matter of pronunciation.

You see, there are a few people playing on Canada’s men’s hockey team at the Olympics whose names derive from French background: Derek Roy, Rene Bourque and Marc-André Gragnani. The catch is they pronounce their own names like anglophones do.

Hockey Canada told French-language announcers that the players’ names ought to be pronounced as the players themselves pronounce them.

Into the breach lumbered Joly, announcing she was “extremely surprised” and that Hockey Canada’s decision was “highly questionable” and that, “We always have to affirm the importance of the French language.”

This is what occupies governments at two levels in Canada? Mon dieu!

Quebec is not going to wither and die because some people don’t choose the French pronunciation of their names.

Not only that, but the notion that anyone should be corrected, by government, on the pronunciation of their own name is absurd, if not downright offensive.

There have been, and continue to be, legions of French-Canadian hockey greats, whose names — French pronunciations and all — are burned into the minds and memories of hockey fans in this country from coast to coast: Béliveau, Richard, Lafleur and Roy among them.

And we learned those names without being told by politicians how to pronounce them.

It’s bad enough Quebec regulates what goes on shop signs. But politicians attempting to sway how sports announcers speak and how Canadian hockey players, representing this great country on the international stage, say their own names, is madness.

There are bigger issues in Canada for us to be worried about, to be sure. (What, exactly, is Justin Trudeau doing in India?) Pity politicians don’t feel they have better things to be doing than scoring cheap political points off the jerseys of Team Canada.

They insult our hockey players and froth at the mouth instead of tackling the real problems of the day. Do better. The government has no place in the names of the nation

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